


make another world (inside my head)

by Lina (lookslikelove)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Dreams, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Imaginary Friends, okay so it was always weird, this got kind of weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 15:51:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2698577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookslikelove/pseuds/Lina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy always believed that he had made Clarke up inside his head. An imaginary friend that he went on adventures with as a kid (and a little longer), someone that he dreamt up, but wasn't real. </p><p>He just always wished he was wrong about the "made up" part.</p>
            </blockquote>





	make another world (inside my head)

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what this is or what it came from. It was an idea that popped into my head, unprompted and unasked for, so naturally I ran with it. It's been a longtime since I've fallen for a pairing like this, so here's my contribution for the collective adoration. 
> 
> I wrote this in one long bender, so I hope you enjoy it. That's all I've got. 
> 
> I'll edit it later.

**i.**

 Imaginary friends are special things. Not simply having one – no, that’s not what makes them special. Countless imaginary friends exist out there in the ether, hanging about, waiting to be needed, for their adventures to start again. Entire cities made up of people and creatures and things that will only be known by a few at a time, introduced to distracted parents and bored baby-sitters, but rarely taken seriously.

 Imaginary friends are normal. They keep the children safe, tuck them in at night, give them something to hold onto when the world seems to big to explore alone.

 Most get packed away when the children go older. They move back to their cities and wait for the next child to come along. Often they are forgotten entirely by the children who once were theirs. Or they come out in stories and fits of nostalgia for a time so long ago.

But like so many rules, there are always exceptions. Exceptions are what truly make them special. 

Sometimes they stay.

 

**ii.**

Bellamy Blake is four going on five when he meets his imaginary friend. It might be weird to have a girl for an imaginary friend, but he doesn’t mind. He would never admit it, but girls aren’t _that_ bad, plus Clarke wasn’t like the girls he knew from his pre-school class.

She was _better._  

Her hair is a bright yellow, which is hard cause he never can find a crayon that matches the right way, but he tries. Her favorite color is green and she hates grape popsicles. She laughs at his jokes and isn’t afraid to get dirty. She tells him stories and listens to his. She lets him hug her when she’s scared and doesn’t make him feel bad about the ideas he has for adventures.

(He’ll even admit her ideas are pretty cool too.)

Every day he collects new things to tell Clarke about, worries to share and promises about the future. He doesn’t understand why his mom just laughs and asks if Clarke would like some juice too when he has his afternoon snack. That’s a silly question. She would want some if she were there, but she’s not.

 Clarke’s special. Just because she’s not with him during the day doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist. Cause she does. Exist that is.

 It’s just that she can only play at night. After he’s been put to bed, stories told and nightlight turned on, that’s when they have their real adventures.

 He can’t explain how he met her, only that he did, but he tries to explain it to anyone who will listen. It feels like he’s always known her.  She just turned up one night when he’d managed to fall asleep again after a nightmare woke him up. He hadn’t wanted to cry because that might wake the baby, which would make his mom mad. So he’d kept quiet, wishing for someone to whisper to and then he’d fallen asleep and there she was, sitting on a swing set and looking pretty and bored. Like a princess from a story, except not.

 Kicking her legs she’d stared at him, watching him as he walked up. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she told him with a solemn nod of her head.

Plopping down on the swing next to her, he’d considered what she’d said and ignored it. “I’m not a stranger. I’m Bellamy.”

“Oh.” A pause before she smiled brightly at him. “I’m Clarke.” 

And that was that.

 

**iii.**

The adventures continue. 

Years pass by (good-bye ages five, six, seven, eight…). Bellamy gets excited for bed, rushing his way through his evening chores. Once or twice he makes Octavia cry without meaning when in his haste he skips over her favorite parts of her stories just so that he can go to his room.

Bellamy never stops telling people about Clarke, not fully anyways.  As he grows older their adventures become the fodder for the stories that he tells Octavia, replacing fairy tale standbys. Octavia loves them, believes that they exist just for her and he lets his little sister have that. He tries to not let it bother him when he tells her about an argument that he and Clarke had over which way to turn in a labyrinth and O had instantly taken Clarke’s side.

(When he tells Clarke about it later that night, the blonde girl preens. “It’s because I was _right_ ,” she points out as he sticks his tongue out at her.) 

Life gets hard, with his mom working so much and money being tight. He has to be strong for his sister and set a good example, but at night he has Clarke to turn to. She still listens, giving him strange yet well meant advice before letting him pick the adventure. Sometimes it’s her who tells him about something that upset her throughout the day and then it’s her turn to pick the adventure. That’s the unspoken rule between them.

During the day he has to be someone else, polite and do his homework, but with Clarke he doesn’t have to pretend.

More years pass and the adventures get both more and less fantastical, filled in by things that he’s read about and stuff he comes up with. Clarke’s contributions seem similarly sourced, peppered by a world he is only half aware of. Together they fill in the missing pieces even if they don’t always make complete sense.

Not once does he question that his was something he should outgrow and leave behind him. 

How could he outgrow his best friend?

 

**iv.**

“Do you ever think this is weird?” Clarke asks him one night when they’re fifteen. He’s surprised by her question and confused by it too. 

Lounging on a worn-out sofa in a café in medieval city gone modern that he’s only ever seen pictures of Bellamy had been flipping through an ancient tome on ancient Rome, her voice breaking through his concentration. The book had probably been originally published sometime in the 1920s, when there were still discoveries to be had and wrong opinions abounded. The leather cover was fading and the binding cracked, which was why it had been left to toil on a shelf marked ‘free’ outside a used bookstore on their way up the hill. He’d grabbed her elbow to make her stop, which made her sigh and roll her eyes when it had started to rain. The café had been a compromise. 

Looking up from his book, he frowns and blushes faintly under his freckles. He hadn’t meant to ignore her, but now that he realizes he had been, he felt guilty. Which was weird. Much like her question.

“What do you mean?”

Sighing. “This,” she gestures to the café around them, then to him and to herself. “Us. All of it. That we have these adventures still.”

Honestly he’s never really given it much thought. Clarke and his adventures with her have been going on for long that he doesn’t consider it anymore. He’d read about recurring dreams before, an idle Google search turned rabbit hole that he abandoned. No one got it right, so he stopped bothering to find someone else.

Shrugging he begins to idly play with the hole in the knee of his jeans. “Not really. I mean, it’s fun and it doesn’t hurt anyone, so why worry?”

Not once does he point out that it’s not real. There’s no point. It’s like telling the grass that it’s green – fruitless and weird. Not even in his dreams is Bellamy _that_ weird.

Sitting across the table Clarke purses her lips as she considers it, tapping her pen against the tabletop. “Okay. It’s just…it’s weird, right?” Shaking her head, she rolls her eyes and goes back to idly drawing on a napkin. “Nevermind. I don’t why I even went there.”

“Cause you’re kind of a weirdo, princess,” he teases, the corner of his mouth twitching up into a smile.

“Takes one to know one, Bell.”

She goes back to sketching and he goes back to his book before he decides they’ve had enough alone time and attempts to snatch the napkin away. She squeals and pulls it closer which only makes him try harder until they’re both laughing so hard that none of it matters.

**v.**

The night his mom dies, she holds him as he cries into her shoulder, breaking down in a show of weakness that he could never do when awake. Her knees press against his as they kneel in the sand, wind picking up as the blue sky clouds over for rain.

When her dad dies six months later and all she wants to do is stand on the top of a mountain and scream until she can’t breathe, he stands next to her, holding her hand. He doesn’t question that imaginary friends would have parents who could die or that Clarke needed to yell until she threw up, dry heaving onto the rocks and snow.

**vi.**

Seventeen and he kisses her.

She’s yelling at him about not appreciating the mathematical ingenuity of the Mayans and how the fourth Indiana Jones movie is even worse when you consider that and he’s just the right combination of amused and exasperated by it. He knows that movie was dumb, he’d said as much to anyone who’d listen. He just doesn’t get what it has to do with the ruins they’re standing next to. Which are in _India._

“And I don’t even know why you’d go in and bring _aliens_ into it, like just think of the beauty of…” Clarke’s breathless from her rant and Bellamy’s run through other ideas so he just leans down and kisses her.  It catches her off-guard so it takes a moment before she reciprocates, kissing him back with a fierceness that had just a moment ago been used on her rant. Her hands knot themselves in the front of his shirt as he slides his own hands down her waist, sliding up the back of her shirt.

 His heart beats a thousand times a minute and they could be on fucking Mars, but he wouldn’t notice. There’s just Clarke and this kiss or more accurate kisses and her tongue in his mouth.

 He wakes in a cold sweat, lips still tingling from kissing her. He swears that he can smell her perfume in the air around him.

  _It was just a dream_ becomes his repeated mantra in his head as he tries to look his girlfriend Roma in the eye the next day before first period.

  _It was a just a dream._

 

**vii.**

 It happens again and again.

 Bellamy kisses her in the Library of Alexandria, on the Great Wall of China, in a local diner down the street from where he lives. His fingers burn from the heat of her skin, he can taste the cherry chapstick she slicks on her lips out of habit. She feels real under his fingertips, skin warm and curves soft. She sighs against him, leaning up on her tiptoes.

 Just as often she’s the one who kisses him. She turns as they’re climbing up a narrow turret staircase on their way to the observatory above, her fingers gripping the collar of his shirt as she leans forward and presses her mouth to his. The stairs have provided a great equalizer to their differing heights.

 Fitting that one of the best things to happen to him occurs only in his head.

 

**viii.**

“We can’t.” Clarke steps away from him when he tries to kiss her as they wander through Persepolis. It’s a strange version of the capital city, part relic and part Hollywood vision of the ancient truth.

Bellamy’s confused because this isn’t really any different from any of the other times. “Why not?”

 She presses her mouth into a line, tucking a wayward strand of hair back up under the scarf covering her head. “I’ve got a boyfriend. It isn’t right.”

 He laughs. “So what? Your boyfriend isn’t here and neither is my girlfriend.”

 “You don’t have a girlfriend,” Clarke points out, words sharpened as she folds her arms against her chest. It’s like she’s trying to hold herself together. “Aren’t we a little old for all this?”

 He dreams of her less after that. He doesn’t know why, but it feels like his heart has been broken.

 

 **ix.**  

It’s the same swing set as when they first met. She’s dressed in a blue sundress that shows off her knees as she swings slowly back and forth, bare feet scraping against the gravel.

 “I miss you.”

 “I miss you too, princess.” Clarke rolls her eyes at the nickname. He’d given it to her when he’d been five and their friendship newer. It’d felt right and all these years and adventures later the nickname still fits like a well-worn glove.

 Sitting down on the swing next to her, he twists to face her as she comes to a halt. There are tears in her eyes as she looks up at him. Leaning forward, he edges closer until his knees hit hers. The chains of the swing dig into his shoulders, but he doesn’t care. Pressing his forehead to hers, noses touching, they just sit there in silence, minutes passing.

“I wish you were real.” Her voice cracks as she says it. Cautiously he reaches out and twines his fingers in her bright hair, never pulling away. The messy curls twist against the tan skin of his hands as he leans forward and gently kisses her.

“So do I,” he breathes as he pulls away.

Never has he wished for anything more.

 

**x.**

Bellamy stops dreaming.

He knows he still must dream, but he can’t remember them. The few he can remember are muddled and confusing. Clarke’s almost never in them and if he does see her, she’s across a crowded room and doesn’t hear him say her name.  Those nights lead to him waking up aching and alone.

He doesn’t dream, but it’s better this way. His childhood’s long over. It’s better that the last part of it has been put to rest.

 

**xi.**

Bellamy’s pretty certain that he’s lost his mind.

 He’s walking through campus, Raven continuing her argument with Jasper from the night about Pacific Rim (something about jaegers and unrealistic engineering versus monsters) with him stuck in the middle of it. He’d enjoyed the movie, of course he had, but arguing the details for this one was just not his cup of tea. It wasn’t like the time they’d tried to watch Troy ironically and it had ended with everyone giving up as Bellamy went on a rant about mixing of radically different classical aesthetics and how was no one else distracted by that?

 Anyways he’s cutting across campus headed towards his late morning classes when he sees her. He has to be hallucinating cause there’s no way he’s asleep, but any other explanation totally fails him.

Clarke’s sitting on a bench next to one of the fountains, scrunching her nose at book in her lap in an expression Bellamy could probably draw from memory if he had any artistic talent whatsoever. Which he doesn’t.

The shock of seeing her there, right in the middle of campus on a bench he’s _sat_ on a hundred times and passed a thousand more times, causes him to stop in his tracks and simply stare. Raven and Jasper make it about six steps before they realize that he’s no longer with them and having a physical buffer is pretty important during times like this.

“Dude, what is it? Forget something?” Jasper asks turning to look back at him.

”He’s processing your dumb as shit argument. That’s not how analogue works,” Raven quips dryly, arching an eyebrow at Bellamy. “Am I right?”

Shaking his head, he blinks rapidly as he tries to process the surreal turn his life has just taken. “No. Can you give me a minute? I…”

He doesn’t even bother to finish the sentence before he pushes pass them, half running the rest of the distance and taking the short steps up to the fountain in one ungainly leap.

“Clarke?”

She looks up at the shadow blocking her light, looking up at him before letting out a faint squeak of surprise. Her book tumbles out of her hands and onto the ground. Instinctively he bends down to pick it up, kneeling in front of her as he offers it back to her. “I think you lost your place.” 

He has no idea why he said that. It just happened.

“Bellamy?” she asks as her hands close around the book, her eyes searching his face. Her eyes are incredibly blue in a way that he’s pretty certain he’d almost forgotten. Have they always been that shade? They’re like the waters of Thira levels of blue. He just nods and repeats her name.

“I thought I made you up.” Her voice is breathless, her ink-smudged hand reaching out to touch his face, tracing lines down his jaw before resting on his shoulder.

A brilliant smile spreads across his face. “Hey, that’s supposed to be my line.”

She just laughs. He bends down and kisses her, slow and deliberate, not caring that it might be weird. It’s a kiss that had been waited on for far too long.

When he pulls back she’s grinning at him and he feels like he won the lottery. Raven and Jasper have caught up and are standing just at the edge of his periphery as he moves to sit next to Clarke on the bench.

Raven’s smirking can be heard in her question. Bellamy doesn’t need to see it to know it’s there. “Who's the girl, Blake?”

“Someone I’ve known my entire life,” is what he says as Clarke nods in agreement, leaning forward to kiss him again.  
  
That’s all there is to it.

 


End file.
